The Dream

I have a dream

To fill the golden sheath

          of a remembered day. 
     

Air      

Heavy and massed and blue

          as the vapor of opium …           

Domes

Fired in sulphurous mist …       

Histrionics

--Albert Parsons

went to his death

singing Annie Laurie;

didn't another have

a rose in his coat--

or was it a pink--

dramatizing himself--

Reveille

Come forth, you workers!

Let the fires go cold

Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs

Let the iron run wild

Like a red bramble on the floors

Leave the mill and the foundry and the mine

And the shrapnel lying on the wharves

Leave the desk and the shuttle and the loom

Come,

With your ashen lives,

Your lives like dust in your hands.

Freedom

Let men be free!

All violence is but the agony

Of caged things fighting blindly for the right

To be and breathe and burn their little hour.

Bare spirits—not debight

In smooth-set garments of philosophy;

But near earth forces, elemental, crude,

Scarce knowing their invicible, rude power;

Within the close of their primeval servitude

Half comatose.

Wind rising in the alleys

Wind rising in the alleys

My spirit lifts in you like a banner streaming free of hot walls. 

You are full of unspent dreams....

You are laden with beginnings....

There is hope in you... not sweet... acrid as blood in the mouth.

An old workman

Warped... gland-dry...

With spine askew

And body shrunken into half its space...

Well-used as some cracked paving-stone...

Bearing on his grimed and pitted front

A stamp... as of innumerable feet.

Lola Ridge

(Picture: Worker in a cap, Pavel Filonov)

Jude

When you tell mama 

you are going to do something great 

she looks at you

as though you were a window 

she were trying to see through, 

and says she hopes you will be good 

instead of great.

Nocturne

Indigo bulb of darkness

Punctured by needle lights

Through a fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars,

And a sliver of moon

Spigoting two high windows over the West river....

Boy, I met to-night,

Your eyes are two red-glowing arcs shifting with my vision....

They reflect as in a fading proof

The deadened eyes of a woman,

And your shed virginity,

Mother

 

















Your love was like moonlight

turning harsh things to beauty,

so that little wry souls

reflecting each other obliquely

as in cracked mirrors...

beheld in your luminous spirit

their own reflection,

transfigured as in a shining stream,

and loved you for what they are not.

Interim

The earth is motionless

And poised in space...

A great bird resting in its flight

Between the alleys of the stars.

It is the wind's hour off....

The wind has nestled down among the corn....

The two speak privately together,

Awaiting the whirr of wings.

Lola Ridge 

(Picture: A rocky coastal landscape in the aegean,Ivan Aivazovsky)